Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Cancel the cowardly WaPo and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Everybody saw this coming.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Republicans in disarray!

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Giving up is unforgivable. ~Joe Biden

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Afternoon Open Thread: Good Climate News and Good People Doing Good Things

Afternoon Open Thread: Good Climate News and Good People Doing Good Things

by | 68 Comments

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I’m all over the place right now…being pulled in a dozen different directions when all I want to be doing is gardening. Luckily it’s going to get stormy for the next few days so I can get some actual paying work done.

A couple of things caught my attention this morning while I was actively ignoring the 24/7 rotting orange corpse sucking up all the media O2.

Here’s some better news to close out the afternoon:

David Roberts had another podcast on the grid, discussing distributed energy, that I missed when I put together the last post.

Now is the time for distributed energy resources

Duncan Campbell of Scale Microgrid Solutions makes the case that distributed energy resources (DERs) — solar panels, EVs, home batteries, etc. — are, thanks to rising electricity demand and constraints on grid expansion, poised for a tsunami of deployment.

 

Open thread

 

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    I posted this in the morning thread, but it fits here

    Hertz is currently offering an array of low-mileage 2023 Chevy Bolt EV and Bolt EUV models for sale, potentially leading to an exceptional opportunity for car buyers. The new listings follow reports released earlier this year that Hertz would reduce its EV fleet amidst fluctuating demand and high costs. The low-mileage 2023 Chevy Bolt EV and Bolt EUV models are listed for sale in the low-$20,000 range, providing an appealing alternative to purchasing new from dealerships where significant market adjustments have inflated prices

  2. 2.

    trollhattan

    @Baud: Probably good deals available, for anybody pondering an EV it could well be cheaper than a new base model Corolla or somesuch driving appliance.

    Don’t know what to think of this overall, but as a living test good for them. Direct-air carbon capture facility comes on line.

    TRACY, Calif. —

    Behind a chain-link fence in a corner of San Joaquin County sits one of California’s — and perhaps the world’s — best hopes for combating climate change.

    Here at the nation’s first commercial direct air capture facility, towering trays of limestone mineral powder are working round-the-clock to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Robots skitter and whir around the 40-foot-tall columns, which are part of a multi-step process that will ultimately convert the CO2 to concrete, rendering the planet-warming compound into nothing more harmful than a stone.

    “We need to do this all around the world,” said Vikrum Aiyer, head of public policy for Heirloom, the California-based company that owns and operates the facility. The good news, he said, is that “CO2 removed anywhere is CO2 removed everywhere.”

    While reducing the use of fossil fuels is the surest way to prevent that warming from getting worse, Aiyer and many other experts, researchers and public officials are converging around the notion that scientific intervention will be necessary.

    “We need to move fast, and we need more lawmakers to not move at the speed and scale of government, but rather at the speed and scale of our children’s generation, and the next generation, depending on it,” he said.
    Glendora, CA – January 03: Storm clouds move on over downtown Los Angeles after rainfall totals of a quarter to one half inch of precipitation overnight on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024 in Glendora, CA.

    The government is getting on board — as is Silicon Valley. The Tracy facility is capable of capturing 1,000 tons of CO2 per year, which will be stored for centuries in concrete that is already being used to build bridges, roads and other local infrastructure. The company makes a profit by selling carbon removal credits to buyers such as Microsoft, Stripe and Klarna, which are investing heavily in the technology.

    But it will take a lot more than 1,000 tons of annual CO2 removal to make a dent in global warming: Current CO2 levels in the atmosphere are 425 parts per million and counting. To truly make a difference will require carbon removal at the gigaton scale, or billions of tons each year, according to the IPCC.

    The limestone towers are already up and running in Heirloom’s 15,000-square-foot direct air capture facility in Tracy.

    The process there involves heating limestone in a massive kiln, which turns it into a mineral powder that is spread onto the towering stacks of trays. The powder acts like a sponge for CO2 — pulling it from the air and hardening into a crust. Once saturated, it is returned to the kiln where the CO2 is extracted, and the cycle begins again.

    The extracted CO2 is transported off site where Heirloom’s partner, CarbonCure Technologies, injects it into recycled water that is used to make concrete that is now being used throughout Bay Area infrastructure.

    “Once it’s in that concrete, it’s not going back into the atmosphere,” Theuer said of the CO2. “It’s permanently a part of that product. Even if in some scenario you blew up the building associated with it, it would still stay embedded amid the rubble and wouldn’t reenter the atmosphere. It’s now a stone.”

    The process is different than carbon capture, which involves capturing CO2 at the source where it is emitted. Carbon capture plays a role in the state’s cap-and-trade program, which sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions and allows companies to buy and sell their unused credits. That program has seen mixed results, with some critics saying it ultimately enables more pollution and creates more allowances for emissions.

    As a commercial operation, Heirloom sells its carbon offsets to a voluntary market at a rate of $600 to $1,000 per net ton, and the company says it does not take investments from oil and gas businesses. Already, some fossil fuel companies have shown interest in direct air capture technology, including at least seven oil and gas producers that have invested in, or are working to develop, direct air capture projects.

    https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-04-22/new-scientific-interventions-are-here-to-fight-climate-change-but-they-arent-silver-bullets?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

  3. 3.

    Anoniminous

    With just the new high voltage power lines costing a minimum of $1,100,000 to over $8,000,000 a mile at-the-demand power production is an economic WIN!

  4. 4.

    trollhattan

    Who’s up for watching Villanelle fighting zombies?

    Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes have joined the cast of the 28 Days Later sequel.

    Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are set to direct and write the film again, which will be called 28 Years Later. The original 2002 film, which starred Cillian Murphy, saw the UK taken over by zombies. The film has already had one sequel – 28 Weeks Later, but this was not written and directed by Boyle or Garland.

    The pair did serve as executive producers on the 2007 film, but this new film is set to launch a new trilogy in the vein of the 2002 original.

    Murphy will also return to the film, not as the main star this time, but as executive producer. Jodie Comer, who won an Emmy for her breakout role in Killing Eve, has recently starred in Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds and in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel.

    Fun fact I just learned: A villanelle, also known as villanesque,[1] is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.

  5. 5.

    Bill Arnold

    @trollhattan:

    But it will take a lot more than 1,000 tons of annual CO2 removal to make a dent in global warming: Current CO2 levels in the atmosphere are 425 parts per million and counting. To truly make a difference will require carbon removal at the gigaton scale, or billions of tons each year, according to the IPCC.

    This should be the first or second paragraph, and bolded. (Not criticizing you.)
    Carbon capture from the air is not cheap, with energy required currently on order of the energy released by the carbon combustion used to produce the CO2 in the first place. (This isn’t a fundamental limit; more efficient capture is possible.) Scale is e.g. thousands of nuclear power plants, devoted to CO2 capture from the atmosphere.
    (And alternative is to wait several hundred years.)
    Best to not spew the CO2 pollution into the atmosphere in the first place.

    e.g. ‘The amount of energy required by direct air carbon capture proves it is an exercise in futility’ – Removing CO2 directly from the air requires almost as many joules as those produced by burning the fossil fuel in the first place, writes Leigh Collins (14 September 2021, Leigh Collins)

  7. 7.

    trollhattan

    @Bill Arnold:

    Am skeptical of anything that requires lots of power to undo pollution attributable in part to generating power.

    If it can short-circuit the ghoulish carbon contribution of cement-making for concrete, maybe they can leverage a net positive?

  8. 8.

    Dan B

    Seattle City Light is encouraging Solar PV as a way to supply clean energy to their customers as the population grows.  Hydropower is tapped out and wind is just keeping up with growing demand.  We got PV 14 years ago.  It was paid off in ten years so now we get a $2,000 check every year.  Nice!

  9. 9.

    TBone

     

    Rwanda is on track to light up every household
    Over the past 15 years, Rwanda has significantly increased its electricity access from 6% in 2009 to 75% as of March 2024. It’s one of the fastest expansions in the world and is thanks in part to investment in renewables and off-grid solutions like solar home systems. The country has also connected 100% of healthcare centres and 84% of schools and small businesses. World Bank

  11. 11.

    Matt McIrvin

    @TBone: Photovoltaic (the solid-state cells that convert light directly to electricity, as opposed to other methods like thermal collectors).

  12. 12.

    TBone

    The US just prioritised conservation on a tenth of its land
    The Department of the Interior has introduced a rule prioritizing conservation, recreation, and renewable energy over traditional resource extraction on public lands, representing a seismic shift in the management of roughly 245 million acres of public property, one-tenth of the nation’s land mass. WaPo

  15. 15.

    Kristine

    A friend who’s been involved in environmental issues for decades is very happy with the latest EPA regulations. Very happy.

  16. 16.

    TBone

    Suspension of Chinook salmon fishing in Yukon River
    Canada and Alaska have agreed to a seven-year moratorium on fishing Chinook salmon in the Yukon River. Last year only 15,000 fish reached Canadian spawning waters; the new agreement has a target of 71,000 Canadian-origin fish reaching their spawning grounds each year for the next seven years. CBC

  19. 19.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Baud: I’m in the market for an EV, so thanks for the link. Looks like they’re asking in low 20s for a base model LT1. A solid vehicle, but pretty bare-bones. Old technology, driven by renters. Not eligible for the $4k used EV fed rebate, either. Not the worst deal ever, but not great. I guess you could always make a $12k offer and see how desperate Hertz is. At some point they’ll be ready to practically give ’em away.

    I’ve rented EVs from Hertz and from Avis. My experience with Hertz was so bad that I’ll probably never rent anything from them again. The car was great (Kia Niro). They absolutely soaked me for returning with the battery less than 100%. And they lied about the entire charging/fine process. Flat-out lied.

    Avis was much, much better. Car was great (Ioniq 5) and the people at the Avis desk were wonderful to work with. Their solution to customers not being able to find a charger prior to return? No charge! However, they told me Avis is getting rid of their EVs because they’ve found it very difficult to estimate range in cold weather.

  21. 21.

    TBone

    New EPA regulation to limit pollution from chemical plants
    A new EPA rule will force over 200 chemical plants across the US to reduce toxic air pollutants to decrease cancer risks for nearby residents. It’s the first regulation in nearly two decades to target ethylene oxide and chloroprene, which are used to sterilise medical equipment and make rubber for shoes. The new measures will reduce an estimated 6,200 tons of toxic pollutants each year. NYT

    EPA sets limit for ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water
    The EPA has set new drinking water standards to reduce exposure to PFAS, a group of human-made chemicals that can increase the risk of cancer and other health conditions. It’s the first time a drinking water standard has been set for a new contaminant since 1996 and is expected to reduce PFAS exposure in drinking water for about 100 million people. Washington Post

  23. 23.

    TBone

    Paris is officially a cycle city
    A recent survey has found that cyclists now outnumber motorists for trips from the outskirts of Paris to the city centre, a huge change from just five years ago. The revolution is thanks to an increase in cycleways and numerous anti-motoring measures, including the closure of some major roads to motorists. Forbes

  24. 24.

    TBone

     

    NY is suing the world’s biggest meat company
    New York is suing JBS, the world’s largest meat company, for misleading customers on its climate commitments. The company’s lack of concrete emission reduction steps and misleading claims make it a fraud case with high chances of success. It’s part of a wave of lawsuits against big businesses for greenwashing sustainability claims. The Guardian

  26. 26.

    trollhattan

    CAISO presently served by 16 GW solar, 5.7 GW wind. Total demand 22.4 GW and we’re exporting more than 4 GW, another 3 GW is charging batteries.

    5 years ago on this date and hour, renewables totaled 13 GW and imports were 4 GW. The trends are promising.

  27. 27.

    Martin

    Carbon capture won’t make sense to deploy until about 2050. The problem is every dollar you spend on reducing what you add to the environment compounds, which will overtake what you invest in removing. So once you hit net zero, that’s when you crank up the carbon capture machine to draw it down. But if you don’t address the addition, carbon capture just turns into an infinite money sink that doesn’t actually do anything. Good to research now, but don’t push for deployment.

  31. 31.

    Martin

    @trollhattan: They’re mostly investing in battery here to take the solar overgeneration and address the early evening spike in demand. That both fixes the heatwave rolling blackout problems, and restores the economic incentive to build new generation by keeping wholesale prices from hitting zero as often.

    I’m honestly not sure how CA ramps up fast enough to cover EV charging demand. Our household usage is pretty modest – about 6MW/year per household. But US EVs draw about 5MW/year and most households will have 2. So our grid, which we’ve been swapping in renewables for but not really having to grow will now have to keep swapping renewables *and* double and a half in size.

    I don’t think it’s possible because the transportation energy cost is so incredibly massive and there’s just not the consumer spending to cover it. I don’t think consumers will spend about twice as much to charge their car as they now spend to power their house, because ultimately that’s what we’re talking here.

  33. 33.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @TBone: woo hoo! Time for another trip to Paris, this time with the Bike Friday tandem. I’d be interested to see how it compares with Dublin. I did Not Like biking in Dublin at all, as the bikes were supposed to be in the bus lanes.

  34. 34.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Martin: I still think that we ought to look at more photochemical processes to convert CO2 into other chemical compounds, and then photo electrochemical processes too (although that is playing the game on a very high difficulty level indeed)

  35. 35.

    trollhattan

    Say it ain’t so, Steve! OTOH this proves you’re no RINO.

    Steve Garvey’s U.S. Senate campaign has paid Ryan Garvey $32,500 since December to serve as a campaign consultant, according to a campaign report filed with the Federal Election Commission.

    Garvey, the Republican nominee for a California U.S. Senate seat, has also reported being reimbursed $15,954 by his campaign this year, the report showed. The report only lists the money as “reimbursement” without giving any further details. Steve Garvey has a son named Ryan Garvey. While it could not be confirmed that the Ryan Garvey listed in the report is the candidate’s son, the address is listed as the same street as the candidate in Palm Desert.

    The Garvey campaign did not respond to a request for comment or clarification. Such spending is not unusual in campaigns. “It is legal (and not unusual) for a campaign to pay a family member provided the family member is providing bona fide services, and the rate they are paid is the usual and normal rate for such services,” said Saurav Ghosh, the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center’s director for federal campaign finance reform….

    He also explained that “a candidate can be reimbursed for campaign expenses that they pay directly. The description of a campaign service as ‘campaign consulting services’ is very common and acceptable under FEC guidelines.” Those guidelines say campaign money “may be used to make salary payments to members of the candidate’s family only if the family member is providing a bona fide service to the campaign and the payments reflect the fair market value of those services.”

    The FEC warns that “any salary payments to family members in excess of the fair market value constitute personal use.”

    https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article287984380.html#storylink=cpy

  40. 40.

    Prometheus Shrugged

    @Martin: I’m not following this argument. Are you talking about some hypothetical exponential time course of relative abatement costs?

    It’s important to keep in mind that some industries (e.g. the shipping industry, which constitutes a nontrivial component of global emissions) are nearly impossible to decarbonize, so it makes all the sense in the world to employ carbon capture to get those industries to net zero ASAP.

    Also important to keep in mind is the fact that the world has shown no strong push to pursue the cheaper abatement strategies involving emissions reductions. Hence the need to talk about carbon capture (which can be immediate and permanent).

  41. 41.

    Another Scott

    I’ve seen headlines of reports that planting trees on a mass scale could make global warming worse, and it’s certainly possible depending on the assumptions.

    But then I think back to stories like this (from 2011)…

    (PhysOrg.com) — A team comprised of geological and environmental science researchers from Stanford University has been studying the impact that early European exploration had on the New World and have found evidence that they say suggests the European cold period from 1500 to 1750, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, was due to the rapid decline in native human populations shortly after early explorers arrived.

    Following up on their paper published in 2008, the team has now brought their findings before the Geological Society of America. The researchers say that the population decrease, which came about due to the introduction of previously unknown diseases, led to the rapid reforestation of the Americas. This led to a sudden increase in the amount of carbon dioxide being pulled from the air, which meant the atmosphere wasn’t able to hold as much heat, which led to colder air covering Europe.

    The team, led by visiting scholar Richard Nevle, came to this conclusion after analyzing charcoal remnants in soil and lake sediments left behind by early American inhabitants as they burned forests to make room for farmland. They found that starting approximately 500 years ago, the charcoal accumulations came to a virtual standstill, coinciding with the death of native peoples.

    Nevle et al then got out their calculators and crunched the numbers. They estimate that for a population of some 40 to 80 million indigenous people, the total amount of deforested land would likely have amounted to something the size of California. And since most estimates suggest that close to 90 percent of the native peoples died or were killed after the Europeans arrived, that meant most of that land returned to forest. That many trees, they say, all of a sudden appearing, almost as if out of nowhere, could have resulted in a loss of some 2 to 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air.

    […]

    It’s hard to think of anything less energy intensive than planting a tree, but it taking 250 years to cause a substantial cooling effect might be a bit too slow.

    :-(

    Seriously, the world is complicated. Physics and chemistry is complicated, and everything is interconnected. Human society never has the luxury of dropping everything to address only one problem. But humans causing rapid increases in the amount of CO2 in the air, and a rapid reduction in the amount of greenery on the planet, cannot help but quickly put a lot of systems that evolved over billions of years out of whack…

    Thanks TaMara and all.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  42. 42.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chief Oshkosh: I think the main reason rental companies are pulling back on EVs is that they overestimated how much they could make reselling them on the used market. That problem apparently exceeds the gain from the lower maintenance costs.

    That said, the one time I rented an EV (a Chevy Bolt from Hertz), my experience was good.

  44. 44.

    Geminid

    I found an article about seaweed farming on The Fish Site titled “The project integrating renewable energy and seaweed farming,” 25 March 2024:

       Simply Blue Group- a blue economy project developer which aims to address climate action targets in Europe by progressing the industries for carbon sequestration and renewable energy production- has joined forces with the North Sea 1 consortium to develop the world’s first commercial-scale seaweed farm located within a wind farm.

    Positioned off the coast of the Netherlands, the 10 hectare farm is planned to be deployed and seeded in autumn 2024, with the first harvest in early 2025.

    The consortium intends to help address climate change by utilizing the vast, untapped potential of seaweed cultivation, which can absorb nitrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon dioxide while producing oxygen. These characteristics of macroalgae make its cultivation a valuable approach to combating climate change and ocean acidification, whils producing a viable biomass with a wide range of uses from pharmaceuticals to fertilizers.

  46. 46.

    Anoniminous

    @TBone:

    City officals are always surprised at the increased use of bicycles when the dangers of getting mowed down by some dickbrain in a car are removed.

  47. 47.

    PST

    Over and above what the administration is doing for the environment, I am happy to see Biden in a cheerful, positive video with AOC and Ed Markey (especially the former). We need all the signals possible that the left wing of the party remains committed to Biden-Harris notwithstanding any differences on Gaza. I hope young people notice.

  49. 49.

    Jeffro

    @Martin:Carbon capture won’t make sense to deploy until about 2050. The problem is every dollar you spend on reducing what you add to the environment compounds, which will overtake what you invest in removing. So once you hit net zero, that’s when you crank up the carbon capture machine to draw it down. But if you don’t address the addition, carbon capture just turns into an infinite money sink that doesn’t actually do anything. Good to research now, but don’t push for deployment.

    This is a great point.

    Also, 2050 ain’t that far away, and we need time to scale up, so…maybe we should start laying the groundwork/infrastructure now for carbon capture?  But tell everyone, “this ain’t the solution for this week, it’s for when we get to net zero”?

  50. 50.

    wjca

    @trollhattan: Am skeptical of anything that requires lots of power to undo pollution attributable in part to generating power.

    Timing.  Timing is critical.  Currently (thanks, in part, to lots of rooftop solar) California finds itself with excess green power generation capacity.  In effect, we have to waste a lot of electricity at some hours of the day.

    Sure, better battery technology may, eventually, deal with this.  But for the moment, using that excess power to undo pollution doesn’t seem like a terrible idea.  Especially since the power needed to do the carbon capture doesn’t need to be used 24/7.  Soak up the excess power when it’s available.

  53. 53.

    Prometheus Shrugged

    @Jeffro: See my comment #40 above, which can maybe be restated like this:

    1.) All the relative costs arguments should not lose sight of how far away from net zero we are now   (Humans are emitting 10 gigatons of carbon per year, the oceans soak up about 2 gigatons of carbon per year, the terrestrial biosphere is basically neutral. China alone emits more carbon than the entire world’s ocean can absorb every year.)

    2.) There are some essential industries that, with current technology, can never reduce their emissions much (shipping industry is prime example–container ships that run on hydrogen are decades away from implementation).  So we will need carbon capture strategies immediately to counteract the pollution from those industries. And there are some carbon capture schemes that are being customized for the shipping industry, for example.

    So I guess my position is that carbon capture will have to be an essential part of a “all of the above” strategy to get to net zero, because we’re not getting to net zero anytime soon with just the emissions part of the balance.

  54. 54.

    TBone

    @Anoniminous: our town has one main street through it and, when they were widening it in one place (in front of a small public park) a lady pedestrian was mowed down by one of the large dump trucks working on the project 😓.  They should have gone ahead with widening more of it than just that one spot.  We have a major annual event for cyclists every year, very well attended and it’s a big deal. People come from all over. Plus, Mennonite and Amish bike on all the major roads here all the time. Hubby and I are able to ride our bikes from our front door through our suburb all the way to the Rail Trail that goes from our town all the way to the next town, through beautiful farmland and country side, but that Rail Trail should be enlarged to start in the town center rather than on the outskirts.  If it were, we’d never drive into town again!

    https://www.lewisburgspringbikeweekend.com/

    The Buffalo Valley Rail Trail (converted railroad bed) is a 9.5 mile long finished scenic trail that spans between Lewisburg and Mifflinburg with trailheads, facilities, and parking areas. Thousands of visitors and residents walk, run, and bicycle the Rail Trail since the trail opened in 2011.
    The Buffalo Valley Rail Trail is a protected spine of asphalt and gravel stretching between Lewisburg and Mifflinburg, PA.  It is available to serve all ages and abilities, whether for recreation or transportation. The trail provides a safe environment for children to play, dogs to explore, and adults to unwind.

  55. 55.

    Geminid

    @Prometheus Shrugged: British climate scientist Myles Allen wrote a good overview of the problem of reducing global emissions for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled “The Green New Deal: a View From Across the Atlantic,” February 2019. Allen worked on the UN’s IPCC repirt released in October of 2018, that set a goal of a carbon-neutral world economy by 2050. Among other things, Allen said he believed that in order to achieve that goal, the industrialized countries would need to invest substantially in negative-carbon technologies.

  56. 56.

    Misterpuff

    I don’t know if we need a post on it, but the campus protests are getting big play on the local news here in LA.

    They are doing reporting from USC and have the traffic helicopters circling waiting for the campus police (and LAPD) to move in to crack skulls (Last night) and I saw in passing the same coverage on the noon broadcasts.  Also the protests got a block on the CBS Evening News last night.

    From the coverage, I got the sense that the normies are bewildered by the protestors and there has been not a lot of analysis here. Bluesky has a mix of sarcasm and a reading of the parallels to the Hard Hat Riots of the Vietnam Protest period.

    I’m all for protesting but I’m wondering when Trump is going to demagogue this as a deflection from his trials and to stoke a backlash to support him.

    I don’t want any blood shed but the other side would seem to relish it.

    What is the way forward?

  57. 57.

    Geminid

    @TBone: The Fish Site seems interesting. The header says it’s focused on “Climate Change, Water Quality, Restorative Agriculture +5 More.” Among their articles:

       Opposition continues for Canary Island Octopus farm

    Environmentalists fear the large scale octopus farm could degrade water quality for nearby turtles and tuna. And some people oppose the project on ethical grounds, saying that octopi are intelligent, solitary creatures and raising them in crowded factory farms would be inhumane. That’s a winning argument in my book.

  58. 58.

    Prometheus Shrugged

    @Geminid: Good find. Most climate scientists (and I’m one) would agree with this perspective–though that’s perhaps not surprising, since the objective of the IPCC assessments is to communicate consensus! I should stress that my own views on the issue derive from analysis of global ocean/atmosphere observations, as opposed to economic or social science principles.  Myles Allen is heavily invested in “citizen science”, so he has a foot in both worlds.

  60. 60.

    Martin

    @Prometheus Shrugged: There is a natural planetary carbon carrying capacity (trees and shit). So we can have some carbon emitting activities so long as there is enough natural capture to balance it out.

    It’s at that point that carbon capture helps. We’ve pushed CO2 to 500ppm, but it’s stabilized there. How do we get it back to 400? Carbon capture solves that. But it’s the wrong investment if that 500 number is still climbing.

    There is no ‘getting an industry to zero’. Industries don’t have such requirements. It’s the full aggregate that matters. We have to eat the stuff we can’t eliminate, and we have to eliminate the stuff that can be eliminated. We know the equation can balance – it balanced for most of human history. It’s hard, but it can be done.

  61. 61.

    Geminid

    @Prometheus Shrugged: What do you think about “weatherizing” projects? People are exploring the effects of spreading stone dust and even concrete ground to 1 mm size on farm fields. The idea is to bind carbon dioxide and help crop growth as well.

  63. 63.

    Prometheus Shrugged

    @Martin:  There’s no such thing as a carrying capacity for carbon in any of its reactive reservoirs (ocean/atmosphere/biosphere/lithosphere).  We know pretty well what the current removal rates from the atmosphere are, what the physical constraints are (uptake basically boils down to the vertical stirring of the oceans), and how the uptake rates might vary in the future.  Furthermore, the climate system isn’t sensitive to addition vs. removal of carbon–just the net–so I’m still not understanding your point about compounding effects of investment in emission reduction vs. carbon capture.  If it’s simply that carbon capture is currently more expensive, then I was  pointing out the reasons why that purely economic perspective might be shortsighted.

  64. 64.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Jeffro: Check out the Hank Green video I linked to–people are developing the tech for later on. It’s not to the point of building out mass infrastructure yet.

  65. 65.

    Martin

    @Misterpuff: I’m seeing the first opening signs here.

    More than any previous day, I’ve seen more reporting today on what the pro-Palestinian students are actually asking for, reporting contrasting the student messages (largely to exclusively not antisemitic) to the non-student messages (not uncommonly antisemitic), and what the broader student movement here is eyeing. Breaking this down:

    1. There’s evidence the crackdowns are hardening the student movement and maybe bringing some of the students that stepped away early in the movement (Oct/Nov) back into it. I’ve been talking a lot about campus communities and how students see themselves in it. Students also share that across communities. In our student protests, they would routinely support other groups on other campuses – they’d go up to the other UC and join (and complain that their student boba sale prices were $1 higher). And in even broader terms – if you go to war with college students and cast them as entitled little shits, expect *all* college students to respond to that in some way.
    2. A fair bit of the reporting today has been focused more clearly on the student demands. They aren’t demanding Biden solve the Middle East. They’re demanding institutional divestment from investments in Israel. It’s easier to cast demands about some geopolitical solution in the Middle East as antisemitic, and much harder to cast ‘reallocate our portfolio’ as such. And today was a big shift in that narrative toward the latter. And I credit this to a little bit of a media blitz by student journalists to clarify what the student perspective is, and the professional journalists getting nudged off of their pitchbot stories and onto this actual story vs the Elaine Stefanik fan fiction we’ve been subject to so far. It’s just a start, we’ll see if it continues.
    3. I’m seeing more expressions from other parts of university administrations (faculty, etc.) trying to de-escalate this.

    So, student arrests have a few consequences:

    1. It returns the students to campus after booking and removes the non-students from that space. It helps clean up clutter of who is who and who is saying what. That’s good, but the downside is that it *deeply* divides the community, destroys all trust the students have with the administration, and steels the students resolve. It solves one difficult problem and replaces it with several others.
    2. It energizes the faculty who were concerned but didn’t want to step out of their lane. Arrests are a bridge too far for many of them.
    3. It resets the narrative with the public. Hardline republicans may think of them as entitled little shits and this may harden their view of the students, but most people just see their kid and remember what it was like to be 19 and gain sympathy for the students. This is especially true if coverage the next day shows a peaceful organized scene (because the non-students have been evicted) which creates a kind of narrative dissonance – these kids don’t look like they should have been rolled on. What gives?
    4. It stalls the narrative that demonized the students. Okay, you rolled in the Texas Rangers, everyone is back on campus, now what? If the protests return, is it national guard? Bayonets? HIMARS? It’s really difficult for that party to continue to escalate their narrative because we can all see with our own eyes that it doesn’t warrant it. That opens a space for the institution to do the thing they should be doing, and that narrative realignment to happen. This requires to some degree that the students recognize the opportunity. And usually at this point they’re kind of tired and do this naturally, and they’ve also learned some really key lessons. They can adapt really quickly.

    My guess here is that this movement will tighten up a bit like the BLM protest did with a more consistent message. Administration will have a bit of room to work with students which probably won’t go anywhere because trust has been shredded. This will shift in some ways to a more academic conversation by faculty and other semi-official voices around divestiture, etc. which we’ve seen many times before, which will further anchor this, and will further deprive the antisemitism narrative.

    But we may have a lull here as students build energy because the academic year is wrapping up, commencements are coming up, and that’s a big opportunity to draw attention back (see how USC jumped to the end of the movie by banning their valedictorian speech). So, tune back in a couple weeks and things may pop off again, but probably in a more organized and larger manner (again, BLM is a good blueprint).

    But then it’s summer break. This may completely dry up when student head off to jobs and summer programs and so on. Campuses get really quiet over summer. There really isn’t anyone to hear the message there. Maybe it moves elsewhere? Not sure.

  66. 66.

    Prometheus Shrugged

    @Geminid: I tend to be fairly skeptical of these strategies for a few reasons:

    1.) It’s not clear how efficient the CO2 drawdown would be–the mineral absorption rates are known to be sensitive to a whole variety of physical variables (temperature/surface area/soil moisture, etc.) that are difficult to replicate for real world application. It could work, but the data just isn’t available to be confident.

    2.) There are all kinds of land use trade off issues that would need to be prioritized. Those arguments would vary by country/region. I just can’t imagine the whole world agreeing.

    3.) Terrestrial ecosystem effects are largely in the realm of speculation, but could be significant.

    Personally,  the schemes that effectively speed up the natural carbon removal processes seem to me to be the most logical to pursue.  These are the schemes that increase the uptake rate of the oceans in one way or the other, where carbon is stored as the neutral carbon species in the ocean (so no obvious ecosystem effects).   The Captura approach is one example, but there are several others.

    So there’s a number of approaches that work in the laboratory but would be difficult to scale up. I’ve always wondered about a world where carbon is captured on a household scale (by a range of possible absorbents), and is picked up like the garbage or recycling on some kind of regular schedule.

  67. 67.

    Geminid

    @Prometheus Shrugged: There might not be much of a land use tradeoff; stone dust is a beneficial soil amendment in most cases. And farmers here already put lime onto their fields so this wouldn’t be much different.

    This might only might achieve only 1% of the needed carbon sequestration, but the aggregate of “natural” negative carbon projects- afforestation, seaweed and marsh grass propagation, regenarative agriculture and aquaculture etc. could have an impact along with more technological carbon capture schemes, even if conservation and conversion to renewable energy provide much the greater contribution. As others point out, we want to be in a position to reduce carbon dioxide even after we achieve a carbon neutral economy; to “run through the tape” so to speak.

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